As the final seconds ticked away on Saturday night, I prepared to immediately make the trek from College Road to the Mods, having learned the rewards for punctuality after the Virginia Tech football game. It isn't often that Boston College wins a national championship in a major sport, let alone against arguably its biggest rival, and I expected the aftermath to make Matt Ryan's comeback seem like a minor event.
I had read of past hockey riots, both celebratory and angry. Alumni posters on Rivals.com forums waxed poetically of the Brian Gionta days, when near-misses in the 1998 and 2000 championship games to Michigan and North Dakota led to the installation of metal picnic tables, bolted into cement, in the Modular backyards.
(To clarify: The old wooden picnic tables were set on fire by an incensed student body and thrown through windows.)
The infamous Mod fence was first put into use to protect the Mods' residents during the 2001 Frozen Four, which was also when the administration first carded students on their way in. The combination of the two, so familiar to current students, was extremely ineffective: Hundreds of students stared down BC Police Department officers, and then rushed the fence and tore parts of it down, ignoring the threat of arrest and partying through the night, while the Office of the Dean for Student Development (ODSD) and ResLife gave up on their attempts to control the chaos.
The year 2001 was not that long ago. The class of 2008 went to school with the very same people who stormed the fence as freshmen in 2001. It was not unreasonable of me to expect a raucous celebration, especially not after the ODSD and ResLife sent so many e-mails and warnings (apparently, they have long memories). But when I arrived on Lower Campus, I found the Mods to be entirely normal. No chaos, no fires, no spontaneous eruption of a normally reserved student body. Just an ordinary Saturday night, the experience of which makes the 2001 story seem fantastical (it's documented in the archives of this newspaper, in case you were wondering).
2008 Woodie Awards
MIke
posted 4/17/08 @ 10:24 AM EST
I agree with most of what you're saying...but the current seniors were not at BC during the 2001 championship. I was a freshman when the'01 team won the title. (Continued…)